Compounded Pain

I hear the tick of melting snow
on the windowpane at my left,
while a restless boy finally sleeps
in the last room on the right.

The cats' chase is the only sound,
though my mind is terribly loud
with my own past failures
and prospects of my bleak future,
for which relentless tears
do nothing to assuage.

Add a newspage of sobering details,
garish realities of a great anguish
in so many places, so far away,
that somehow penetrates my cells
and makes my head swell
to compound the pain already there.

I let myself go outside
among the bare, grayish-brown trees.
I let the icy cold touch a lot of skin,
while my nightshirt blows in the winter breeze.
I let the frozen, compacted snow
hold me up on bare feet.

I add more tears for life and death,
in a world of pain and despair,
but still there is no relief, no change
to what has happened, how many have died,
and what I have and haven't done.

My only solace, I find in the ice
that I feel stabbing into my feet,
into my ankles, on up my thighs.

--in commemoration of personal and worldwide pain of December 2004